Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Wednesday September 12, 2012 @12:18PM
from the small-world dept.

New submitter overmoderated writes first with news of an attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya. From the article: "The U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other embassy staff were killed in a rocket attack on their car, a Libyan official said, as they were rushed from a consular building stormed by militants denouncing a U.S.-made film insulting the Prophet Mohammad."
An anonymous reader adds: "Sean Smith, a.k.a. Vile Rat, an EVE Online CSM member, and diplomat for the GoonFleet corporation, was one of the four killed in the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya last night. He was 34. A fundraiser is being organized for his children by the Something Awful forums."
Update: 09/12 21:28 GMT by U L: Ozma from Something Awful mailed in a link to the memorial thread on the SA forums (including details on the memorial fund).

He wasn't a diplomat he was a tech guy working in the consulate. I can understand the confusion, Sean Smith aka Vile Rat was a diplomat for the eve online alliance Goonswarm and a former member of the CSM.

He leaves behind two kids so presumably it would go towards them and any funeral costs.

nah that wasn't his last chat transcript. That was just an example that was pretty common to hear from him when he was in Iraq . His lats words on jabber were "FUCK" and "GUNFIRE" and then he disappeared off Jabber.

The Cold War was peace and harmony compared to this Islamic fundamentalist shit. This is fucking terrifying.

Why are you so terrified? You're not in the middle of it. And people die every day. To be afraid of death is just silly. Now I would not blame anyone for wanting to live as long as possible, but any one of us could die tomorrow of an infection from a cut, a car accident, an illness, an aneurism, or a thousand other things. You can't live your life in fear of every possible thing that could happen. Now if you're a soldier fighting against these people, then you would have to be crazy to not be scared. But all living things must die, and people need to learn to accept it, and not sacrifice all their rights, freedoms, and happiness in an ever illusory sense of safety.

So what you're saying is that about 1 billion muslims are not really muslims at all because they don't kill all the infidels? Really? Do you want to go to the local mosques and educate them on that? Or is it just that you didn't actually read the Hadith, didn't read the Quoran, and just go by what some flamebait site like religionofpeace.com says?

Have you read Leviticus, Deuteronomy, or Exodus? Those books are filled with various reasons for which you should kill people (see here [evilbible.com]), among others.

Of course, most modern Christians choose to ignore those parts of the bible, aside from the occasional abortion clinic bomber. The only real difference is that there are a significant number of Muslims who haven't figured out that they should ignore the parts of their holy text that say to kill people.

The revolts happened without US influence, yes. And they were nearly crushed when the West decided to intervene.

And, yes, US was not the main player there (which is why I referred to NATO and not US), but it certainly supported the whole affair big time.

Also, the UN resolution only established a no-fly zone, and allowed the use of military force against anyone (whether loyalists or rebels) targeting civilians. In practice, the way it was implemented by NATO countries, they only ever targeted loyalists - despite the rebels engaging in open genocide of black Libyans during and after the campaign - and they targeted loyalist targets indiscriminately, even when they were engaging rebel fighters and not civilians. It had actually got to the point where there was coordination established between rebel militias and NATO strike forces such that the rebels would be alerted of the upcoming air strike against loyalist armor & artillery, and time their assaults so that they happen immediately after those strikes. In other words, it was direct military support for one side in a civil war, under the guise of protecting civilian population.

Goonswarm Alliance is a superpower in eve. It's long been a mystery how such a collection of mismatched personalities manages to stay so perfectly organised. Now we know: They had a professionally trained diplomat.

Neither Breivik nor McVeigh was a Christian by any rational definition of the term. McVeigh was an avowed agnostic. While Breivik called himself a Christian, he explicitly said that he did not believe in the religion.

Feynman would have nothing to do with his origins/ethnicity. He refused being included in a book about "great Jewish men" (I paraphrase), and he'd be probably quite offended by you using his name in this fashion. Yes, what you cite is a fact, but the argument is charged, and he'd want nothing to do with it I bet.

... and the implication is that makes Mohammed (and apparently, by association, every Muslim who ever has or ever will live) a horrible person not worthy of attention, right? That's funny.

Why, you may ask? Because it's a silly double standard - for example, it's a well known fact that Edgar Allen Poe, considered one of the greatest poets of all time, married his 13-year-old cousin less than 2 centuries ago, yet nobody calls him a(n inbred) pedophile, nor do they accuse his readership of supporting pedophilia.

Lewis Carroll wrote "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" in order to convince an 11-year-old to let him fuck her, but nobody calls Lewis Carroll a pedophile (well, almost nobody - myself being an obvious exception).

Shit, a few thousand years ago, the Greeks made a career out of fucking kids, but nobody I've ever met thinks that all Greeks are disgusting perverts.

But then some non-Muslim makes a movie portraying the Muslim prophet as a filthy child-buggerer, and all of a sudden it's proof positive that every Muslim in the world agrees with pedophilia.

So, to summarize: Real white people who like to fuck kids == no worries; Possibly imaginary prophet of one of the worlds largest religions is speculated to be a pedo == ALL MUSLIMS MUST DIE IN FIRE!!!

I guess that's not funny; It's stupid. Really, really stupid.

Note that this post should not be taken as being supportive of pedophilia; quite the opposite. Rather, it is a condemnation of bullshit double standards and the egocentric asshats who perpetuate them.

In any case, no matter how detestable the content of the film, it's just speech. The responsibility for the deaths here lies entirely on the heads of the people who meet speech with violence.

Sean was a very patient man. You have to be patient to play Eve, especially to play the meta-game of diplomacy. He built a great legacy for in-game diplomacy and it's no stretch to say that he's responsible for alot of the way things are aligned politically in the game. He loved the diplomacy game in Eve because it was a sandbox that oftentimes mirrors real life. He loved people and he was often the voice of reason, not just for game matters, but for lots of real life things.

Sean made every attempt to be the best person he could be and that rubbed off on alot of us. If I was having a bad day and I needed to vent, he would be there and he would have sane advice. I was really sad when he left the Montreal duty station to move to the Hague, because that meant a timezone difference that's hard to deal with. He managed to keep up with everyone though. He cared about his friends and there aren't many goons that would refuse his advice or insight.

He wasn't just a IT guy in the FSIMS. He once told me that you can do many things outside of your job description when working for State. He always said that if you were motivated and eager to learn, you could go far there and have a very challenging and worthy career. Naturally, there were lots of things that he couldn't tell us but to say that he was simply a IMS guy is not completely accurate. He lived for it and I have no doubt in my mind that there was not any occasion that he would not rise to.

I cannot even begin to tell you how hard this has been on all of us. When you talk to someone everyday and share the little things of your day to day life and you share your trials and tribulations and successes, you really miss that person when they are gone. It's surreal, even the possibility of him dying was sort of a standing joke, like it would never happen to him. I guess you think that way about anyone that's deployed in a government or military post because if you stop to dwell on the risks, you break down.

There's not enough thanks in the world for the guys that work for state or the guys in our military. It's easy to be dispassionate until you know someone that is lost or know someone that has lost. Eve not only lost a great player but a great friend.

Hearsay confirmation, state intelligence have been (unofficially, internally) confirming that the attacks were not caused by the same people who were protesting the film, and that bringing the weapons and inciting violence were a crime of opportunity by a known foreign militant group who tried to attack them before.Not just US consul staff were killed, but so were as many protesters and Libyan guards who worked at the Consulate.Ah, here's the SECSTATE: http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/12/world/africa/libya-attack-jihadists/index.html [cnn.com]